Microsoft rocked the IoT cloud space with its announcement of the Azure platform back in March. Well, on September 29, at its AzureCon event, Microsoft made a series of announcements about how the platform is enhancing new solutions for supply chain, security, infrastructure and the entire IoT.
“We live in a connected world, and the intelligent cloud is powering it all,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP, Cloud + Enterprise Division, Microsoft. “As data and devices continue to proliferate, there is vast opportunity for businesses to tap into their data to make their applications more intelligent. Through our offerings across applications, data and IoT, and cloud infrastructure, we are enabling companies to innovate more easily and rapidly, using the tools and platforms they know and love.”
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Addressing the difficulties and necessity of tying supply chain infrastructure into the IoT, Microsoft announced a new Azure Container Service that will help users deploy and configure Apache Mesos to cluster and schedule applications loaded with Docker across multiple virtual hosts. This solution, combined with Azure, is based on open source to enable customer choice across the ecosystem and will support Windows Server containers in the future.
For big data applications, the company announced that its Azure IoT Suite is available for integration with processes, devices and systems in order to build and scale IoT projects. In addition, Microsoft announced the new Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT program, an ecosystem of partners whose offerings have been tested and certified so businesses can take their next IoT project from testing to production more quickly. Current partners include BeagleBone, Freescale Intel Corporation, Raspberry Pi, Resin.io, Seeed Technology Inc., and Texas Instruments Inc.
In terms of data management and analytics, the Azure Data Lake on Linux brings together Azure Data Lake Analytics, Azure Data Lake Store, a new programming language U-SQL, and Azure HDInsight to make big data processing and analytics simpler and more accessible.
The new Azure Security Center, an integrated experience designed to give customers visibility and control of their data without impeding agility, integrates with security solutions from Barracuda, Checkpoint, Cisco, CloudFlare, F5 Networks, Imperva, Incapsula and Trend Micro. It analyzes information from customer deployments and compares with global threat intelligence aggregated by Microsoft, which helps users detect threats while taking the guesswork out of cloud security.
That’s not all, either. Microsoft has positioned itself with Azure to take key position in the battle for Cloud City. It’ll be great to see who ends up frozen in carbonite.
Edited by
Kyle Piscioniere
